Quotes

I can't resist sharing a few great quotes from the book:

• Labor can often be organized more efficiently in the context of community than it can in the context of a corporation.
• “No matter who you are,” Joy once said, “most of the smartest people work for someone else.” That, in a nutshell, is what this whole book is about. Given the right set of conditions, the crowd will almost always outperform any number of employees—a fact that companies are becoming aware of and are increasingly attempting to exploit.
• Crowdsourcing has the capacity to form a sort of perfect meritocracy. Gone are pedigree, race, gender, age, and qualification. What remains is the quality of the work itself.
• But more than simply identifying diamonds in the rough, crowdsourcing also cultivates and nurtures that talent. In this way, crowdsourcing adds to our culture’s general store of intellectual capital.
• It capitalizes on the fact that our interests are more diverse than our business cards would have one believe.
• Crowdsourcing is like an immense talent-finding mechanism.
• In spring 2007, YouTube announced it would begin giving its most popular contributors—those whose videos regularly get viewed more than a million times—a cut of ad revenues, which is a strong indicator that those parallel universes are starting to collide. The future of entertainment will, at least in part, be outsourced to the crowd.
• By one measure at least, YouTube is a very small company. Before being acquired by Google, its sixty-seven employees fit into three floors of an unremarkable office building in San Bruno, California. That’s exactly one fewer employee than work at the average American nursing home. But by another measure, YouTube is a far larger company. At the time of its acquisition by Google, YouTube was valued at $1.65 billion. That number could seem unreasonable by conventional measures, but YouTube is hardly a conventional company.
• Google didn’t pay for the expertise housed within that San Bruno office. It paid for the millions of users who create and submit videos to YouTube, and for the traffic they drive to the site. It paid, in short, for the community—the people who use it to engage in a conversation in a language of moving images.

  YouTube is far from the only company whose primary asset is its community. Facebook employs roughly seven hundred—a skeleton crew for a company that was valued, at the time of Microsoft’s investment in the social networking site, in the region of $15 billion.

  As of early 2007, Wikipedia employed only five people. By contrast, the Encyclopedia Britannica was written by over four thousand paid contributors and one hundred full-time editors. In these cases, the community is taking the place of the corporation.

• The conventional corporation isn’t going away anytime soon, but its hegemony is certainly under assault. Despite its unchallenged reign throughout the twentieth century, the traditional corporate structure is an artifact of the Industrial Revolution.

Howe’s book has many case studies that are easily read and free of techno-jargon. Whatever line of work you’re in, you’ll find this well-written book a fascinating look into the future of business. I know people who are experimenting in the eminent domain that is the Internet. Buckle up: it’s a great ride!